Avey Tare - 7s

That ‘7s’ is the product of Avey Tare’s isolation-addled brain won’t come as any surprise: its repetitive nature, and at points whisper-level stillness, tracks perfectly with its home-recorded beginnings. Built largely around repetitive loops - whether the piano plink of opener ‘Invisible Darlings’ or the wooze of ‘The Musical’, it’s as expected from the Animal Collective man; a mish-mash of sounds, picked up magpie-style to create something which consistently skirts the line between warm and distant, familiar and disconcerting, hypnotic and, well, irritating. ‘Hey Bog’ begins by constructing an uneasy atmosphere as seemingly free-form sounds spit over beats before building towards a subdued euphoria; the wonderfully weird ‘Neurons’ uses discordant electronic sounds and fires them across a cacophonous beat while Avey repeats its title to the point it loses all meaning - a fever dream of a track. Conversely, the mix of closer ‘Cloud Stop Rest Start’ has his vocal so intimately placed it’s almost ASMR (as divisive as it gets, surely) and the featherlight loops of ‘Lips at Night’ might emanate a vintage warmth, but the line towards irritation is easily crossed barely a minute in. Still, if only all boredom could be so productive.